Extracellular takes its title seriously. If the body of a label is its catalogue, this 12" is the fluid in between - the zone where signals are exchanged and life is communicated, where friends, allies and fellow travellers brush up against one another and send currents across the synapses. Curated around the idea of the “space between cells”, the compilation gathers a UK/EU constellation of artists and lets their languages - pulsing electro, frayed jazz fragments, industrial dub, spoken abstraction, folk‑noise and modular psychedelia - overlap until they behave like a single, responsive network.
The record opens with Hidden Horse’s “Trespass Into The Maze”, a disorienting doorway. Produced by JB Kyron with Ana Farinha and Tony Watts and trailing their forthcoming third album Renewer, it’s a startling step sideways from Beautify Junkyards’ haunted pastoral, swapping wooded reveries for steam‑wreathed concrete. Cabaret Voltaire‑like machine throb, Chris & Cosey pulse and the desolate moodscapes of Burial bleed into a single, haunted glide that immediately sets the tone: club‑adjacent but uncanny, rhythmic yet smeared at the edges. Sophie Sleigh‑Johnson’s “Chaldean Acts” slips in like a scrambled broadcast from another band of the spectrum. Formerly of These New Puritans, now an academic and sound artist, Sophie folds the same occult pop‑cultural archaeology as her book Code:Damp into a piece that feels like psychic reportage from Southend: tele‑vision canticles, Ellen Freed’s voice, electronics and text collaged into a séance conducted through the TV snow.
If those tracks sketch the compilation’s conceptual perimeter, “Sleepless In Settle” by Johnny Richards & Dave King throws some joyous friction into the mix. UK pianist/composer Johnny Richards (The Sorcerors / ATA Records) and US drummer Dave King (The Bad Plus) build a genre‑dodging dialogue of knotted rhythms, prepared‑piano colour and irreverent sound play, lifted from their album The New Awkward on False Door Records. It teeters between experimental jazz and layered composition, like a late‑night duo session accidentally wired through a tape splicer. Domotic’s “Ossature / Fourrure Sounds” then swings the needle decisively back toward the dancefloor: Stéphane Laporte’s pulsating electro beats, dub‑smeared delays and abstract synth lines, originally on Antinote and heralding his forthcoming Fourrure Sounds on Astra Solaria, behave like the record’s circulatory system, sending low‑frequency information through every channel.
At the centre of Extracellular the textures grow murkier, more psychogeographical. Revbjelde’s “Non Chion” finds Alan Gubby’s shape‑shifting folk‑noise collective deploying electric guitar, granular sampling and biofeedback in a fragment from the soundtrack to his second novel The Working Of Bucca Dhu. It feels like a landscape remembering its own folklore, signal and soil entangled. Saïph’s “Tellurkraft”, produced by Pablo Diarra and first available on cassette via Accents Records, conjures dancing rites and nocturnal ceremonies with rolling kicks, nervous basslines and crackling percussive detail, as if a ritual circle has quietly formed in the club’s blind spot. Oh Mr James’s “The Acid Riddle” detonates that tension in a flash of Braindance‑tilted euphoria: Cornwall‑based producer Benjamin James Wood, part of a new wave flagged by The Quietus, cross‑wires modular hardware and desktop soft synths into intense dancefloor anthems and clipped rhythmic vignettes humming with robotic soul, rebooting IDM mischief for the present tense.
The final third leans hard into speech, collage and altered states. Secluded Bronte’s “Unknown Information” distils the trio’s unruly practice - Richard Thomas, Jonathan Bohman and Adam Bohman folding improvisation, speech, musique concrète, pop detritus, rock ’n’ roll, theatre and expanded cinema into a miniature drama laced with pathos, wry humour and well‑placed obscenity. Time Attendant’s “Lapping Up Flames”, from Paul Snowdon’s The Feral Mould, feels like unearthing lost Brutalist architecture at a village fête: synths, tape textures and rhythm fragments blur industrial and rural signifiers until the distinction becomes meaningless, a paradoxical pleasure/pain zone humming just beneath the village green. Etceteral’s “Minus”, drawn from their album Kimatika, injects a dose of propulsive, polyrhythmic jazz: the Slovenian trio of Boštjan Simon (baritone sax and electronics), Marek Fakuc (drums) and Lina Rica (visuals) deliver an “irresistible splurge” of krautrock grooves, heavy modular doom, ricocheting horns and crystalline production that turns the neural metaphor literal - synapses firing in tightly interlocked patterns.
The compilation closes on two pieces that crystallise its interest in language and interface. “Clock Tower” by Dolly Dolly & Fogroom pairs surrealist poet David Yates with musician Jörg Follert in an Anglo‑German collaboration that plays like a dream left running inside a public building after hours, a prelude to their forthcoming album following a 2025 EP on Russian Library. Finally, Gong Girl’s “Kinetic Kinetic Kinetic” – the work of Lithuanian‑born composer, sound designer and experimental instrument‑builder Guoda Diržytė – turns the focus onto the act of sounding itself: self‑created musical interfaces and robotics generate clattering, shimmering patterns that feel as much like choreography as composition, a reminder that every signal has a body somewhere.
Compiled by Alan Gubby, mastered by Zyklus and designed by Geometric Love, Extracellular functions as both a dispatch from a diffuse community and a proposal for how a compilation can work: not as a sampler of isolated tracks, but as a living tissue where each piece is a cell, each transition a synapse, and the real music happens in the charged space between.
